File Corruption Solutions

[stanley]

Hi all, and happy holidays:

I'm working on a solution for a client who had an intern building his FM Server solution, and the intern has left the company, so I was called in to finish the job. This is the first time I've had to finish someone else's job, having previously done everything myself from scratch.

Before I turned up, it seems that the intern was allowing users to access the databases using file sharing, and the files were being corrupted on a fairly regular basis. Now, I am working on them at my office, and in the meantime the customer will not be using the system at all, so the install will be clean, so far as what comes off my computers. The problem I'm worrying about is that I am working with files that at one point or another were having problems. There is no data in the files at all, and I haven't had a problem with the files since after first opening them, when consistency checks were performed by FM Pro on maybe half of them.

My questions are:

1. Can the corruption (if there is any) still exist, even though there is no data present?

2. What would the warning signs be?

3. What can I do to ensure that the files I output at the end of the project are as clean as can be?

I've been working with FM Server for over two years now, so I know enough to know some of the answers to these questions. However, like I said, I've never had to deal with a solution originally designed by someone else before, and I also have no idea how many times the files were corrupted, or what the results (crash, warning dialog, etc) were at the time of corruption.

All help welcome.

Thanks

-Stanley

[Paolo]

1) Yes

2) Any kind of malfunction from now on

3) Rebuild the solution from scratch

[RodinBangkok]

Stanley, I've ran server5.5 on OSX in the nightmare days before v4 was released, and had a lot of crashed files. During that time I rebuilt the files in OS9 and reloaded them on FMS, said a prayer and waited, a week later repeated same. This went on for some time till FMS 5.5 V4 came out. I can say that with the files that were consistently effected by whatever bug was in FMS before v4 has not effected them since. They are performing with no problems now. Having said that this is only my experience, but have been running FMS5.5V4 since V4 was released and have not had one corrupted file or strange behavior on the files that were often corrupted in the past.

for what its worth

Rod

[stanley]

Thanks guys.

Unfortunately, rebuilding from scratch is not in the cards - I'm only being paid to finish the job that was already started.

I'm due to turn it in by the 15th of January, so we'll just cross our fingers and see. But as of today, the thing hasn't crashed since it has been in my hands...

-Stanley

[dkemme]

I had a file corruption problem that was solved by exporting subsets of the records to a clone file until the corruption disappeared, then combining the subsets to one file again. In this instance I was able to check for corruption with a recover command on the subset which was able to sense the problem. I then split that subset again, until recovery was able to "correct" the problems. Didn't make much sense to me why Filemaker suggested this, but the corruption has not resurfaced after 2 years.